This is Not Art

Activism and Other 'Not-Art'

Alana Jelinek

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857738028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Art is not political action. Art is not education. Art does not exist to make society stronger, or the world a better place. Art disrupts and resists the comfortable, the stiflingly familiar and the status quo, or it only serves to deaden a disenfranchised society further. So argues This Is Not Art, a radical and vigorous critique that debunks myths about art in order to celebrate its real and unique importance. With the postmodern deconstruction of now-outdated shibboleths such as 'genius', 'authenticity' and 'beauty', new and neoliberal myths about art have arisen to take their place: that art's value is primarily monetary as a prized and marketable commodity, or that art is important because it ameliorates social problems. These ideas are not only the province of art-dealers and power-brokers, but pervade the part of the artworld that defines itself as radical, political or ethical too. Highlighting the social mechanisms of legitimisation and dissemination that exclude the genuinely disruptive or defiant, This Is Not Art draws on Foucault and Marx to uncover an artworld obsessed with profit and from which diversity, individuality and freedom have been erased.
In the search for a new way to understand art's urgent importance, Alana Jelinek returns to the question of 'what is art?', retelling the history of art practice for our contemporary moment and exposing the ways in which neoliberal norms and values have seeped into every aspect of our lives. From the author's unique perspective as a practicing artist and theoretician, This Is Not Art offers not just a searing criticism of the artworld as it is, but a vision of a new way of understanding and practicing art - as the embodiment of power and agency within us, the possibility of thinking and acting differently, of finding new stories to tell.

Part I

Setting the Scene

Part I contains two chapters that define this book’s area of concern. The first describes the context of art practice today, namely neoliberalism; the second addresses theories of art in order to understand how the artworld actually operates as distinct from how we like to imagine it operates. The reason for spending nearly one-third of the book defining terms is because an understanding of the complexities within, and the interaction between, art and its context is fundamental to the arguments in the rest of this book. Often in books that are critical of the interaction between neoliberalism and the contemporary artworld, we find that authors spend little time defining what they mean by art and artists, and no time defining neoliberalism. I find this interesting. Clearly, for many in the artworld, the definition of art is still not to be taken for granted. It is not just the general public who find they need an explanation for its complexity and seeming arbitrariness but, ever-conscious of its boundaries, the artworld itself needs to justify what counts and what doesn’t. Artists are uncomfortable in our role as police and we pretend that we allow anything to be art and anyone to be an artist, but in reality this is far from the case. By contrast, when it comes to understanding neoliberalism we either assume a common understanding of the term or that the term is simply a modish synonym for global capitalism (and then assume there’s a common understanding of that). The arguments presented in this book place art in its social context in order to explore how art practice has become a mechanism of neoliberalism and, more importantly, how practitioners may do things differently.

CHAPTER 1

Neoliberalism and the Artworld

Summary

This chapter describes the economic and political structures of neoliberalism, namely privatisation, trade liberalisation and deregulation, and demonstrates how contemporary artworld structures now mimic and replicate them. This is in order to demonstrate that not only are these changes (which feel normal in the present) recent innovations but that they are pernicious. Despite the fact that many in the artworld claim a leftist politics, and some are even politically motivated to critique neoliberalism and undermine its structures, most in the artworld most of the time are actually replicating neoliberal structures and embodying and perpetuating its values. In this chapter, the artworld is described partially: only the well-financed end of the artworld spectrum features. Yet neoliberal values permeate all areas of the contemporary artworld, regardless of its financing or position within artworld hierarchy. Increased privatisation in the artworld can be seen in three interrelated areas: (1) the new dominance of the art market and the growing role played by auction houses; (2) the artworld’s embrace of a funding structure that requires private money in order to receive public funding; (3) the rise of the knowledge economy. The proliferation of art biennials, large curated state-sponsored extravaganzas, is described as an instance of states parading their compliance with the neoliberal imperative to trade liberalisation (trade liberalisation is later discussed as the second aspect of neoliberalism, the first being privatisation). The discussion about deregulation (the third aspect of neoliberalism) describes an artworld that has always been a paragon of that important article of neoliberalism, namely self-regulation. I argue that, for this reason, as well as the structural changes brought about by recent changes in line with neoliberal ideology, the contemporary artworld is now exemplary of neoliberalism. We replicate its structures and its values. As this ultimately undermines any prospect for a radical or disruptive art, I describe the mechanisms and values as fully as the limited space here allows. Replicating the dominant economic and social model may not matter to some, particularly those who are to the right of politics or those ‘doing well’ under this system, but my argument is that, ultimately, neoliberalism equates to hierarchy and systemic exclusion, mediocrity, private monopolism and monoculturalism cloaked in values of freedom and a distorted idea of individual responsibility. It is no coincidence that the financial sector now plays a highly visible and originative role in the contemporary artworld.

Neoliberalism

I will put my cards on the table: I am no economist but in my later teens I read Marx, or attempted to read him from the point of view of the Socialist International, which I had joined. During my time at art college (1987–90) a year or two later I engaged with Marxist critique. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci were the mainstays of art education at that time. During the late 1980s, class critique was being nuanced by feminist and postcolonial critique, so these too formed part of my reading. As an art student I was expected to be conversant in the problems of the culture–power nexus. In fact, the ideological underpinnings of my art-college education contained an overt fundamental commitment to various freedoms, particularly freedom of speech, in addition to a strategic awareness of the mechanisms of power that deny the possibility of freedom. The implicit understanding was that if you believed in freedom for all equally, you more or less shared these same tools of critique: Marxist, feminist, postcolonial. It came as a big shock to me 20 years later to hear that neoliberalism draws on the same values of freedom and even equality, but from a decidedly pro-market perspective. I decided to investigate that economic, political and social ideology, despite the fact that its views come from a diametrically opposed tradition, in case it had a point. What I found is that neoliberal values permeate not just wider society but the contemporary artworld, including both the market-orientated and the politically engaged parts of the artworld, to the detriment of both freedom and equality.

Neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the artworld: on its structures, its institutions and the art market. There have also been changes in artworld discourse that could be understood as the internalisation of neoliberal values. These are described in later chapters. Here I want to concentrate on how three economic-political mechanisms of neoliberalism are played out in the artworld, namely privatisation, trade liberalisation and deregulation, with a major focus on privatisation. Critiques of the increasing market-orientation of the artworld and the increasing market-orientation of art practice have been around for decades. The amusing article ‘The Rise of Andy Warhol’, originally written in 1982 by Robert Hughes for The New York Review of Books, is a case in point.¹ What I am doing here, however, is different. I am making a connection between neoliberal values and ideology and the contemporary artworld: not only a point about greed, markets and the mediocre banal product of these markets. This features here as well, but I wish specifically to demonstrate that neoliberal mechanisms and values have been internalised by the artworld and that this is a systemic change across all types of art practice, which is creating further changes.

David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism charts the beginning of neoliberalism to the macro-economic innovation of monetarism of Milton Friedman in the 1960s.² Its rising appeal from the mid-1970s gained a sure footing in the 1980s in global economic and political structures through the policies of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. These were implemented worldwide through the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), as described by Joseph Stiglitz, economist to the Clinton administration.³ Though a global phenomenon, neoliberalism has a particular flavour in the UK and US, where the state itself has become ‘hyperliberal’, meaning that the state has been transformed to one in which ‘the pattern of social power … has realised the ascendancy of the perceived interests of the social forces of capital, particularly those groups, including financiers, seeking to expand their involvement in the world economy’.⁴ In other words, wider society – its structures and discourse – reflects and reinforces the values and priorities of the financial sector. This is particularly the case in London. This chapter will describe how the artworld, as part of that wider society, has come to reflect and reinforce the values and priorities of the financial sector and the problem of this for the values of equality and difference generally, and for art specifically.

Economically, neoliberalism rests on privatisation, trade liberalisation and deregulation. Ideologically, the concept equates to a distrust of the state as provider of social goods such as health, education and the arts. Neoliberal ideology also places an emphasis on individuals rather than systems, imagining individuals as rational beings within rational systems where choices can be made. There tends to be a generalised distrust of authorities: authorities are equated with the state and regulation.

It is important to note that neoliberalism is not the same as capitalism. Briefly, neoliberalism is a set of innovations to structures that maintain a capitalist model of ownership and accumulation. Many artworld practitioners wary of capitalist excesses such as extreme inequality or environmental degradation nevertheless maintain neoliberal values and assumptions. Many artworks shown in museums and at biennial exhibitions explore anti-capitalist themes, denouncing its various exploitations; yet many of these same artists also maintain aspects of neoliberal ideology as if it is natural common sense and non-ideological. In general, the artworld supports the idea of market meritocracy, measures ‘impact’ and believes that the value of art lies in its social or economic impact. All these can be described as internalised neoliberal values and are new developments within artworld thinking and values. They have only come to seem axiomatic since the mid-1990s (in London).⁵

As I argue that the contemporary artworld replicates the core mechanisms within neoliberalism, it is important to be clear about what these mechanisms are. The investigation around privatisation will be broken into three parts: (1) the ‘mixed economy’, (2) the rise of the art market, and (3) the knowledge economy.

Privatisation and the ‘mixed economy’

Privatisation is the mechanism whereby what was once owned by the public and managed on our behalf by the state is sold to private owners. Those public goods came about historically through the rise of the nation state and then, with the nineteenth century, through utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number). Where parishes previously provided local, and therefore piecemeal, goods and services, public goods became standardised and universal. Infrastructure such as roads and sewers and communications such as the postal service and telephone network were public goods, owned and managed by the state; so too were trains and railways stations; aeroplanes and airports; plus telephone exchanges, lines and the telephones themselves. All the services required to keep a nation healthy and safe – such as water, waste and sanitation, prisons, law enforcement and the armed forces, plus a health and dentistry service – were at different points managed by the state on our behalf. Also, the goods that help create a better society for more people were also provided by the state, including education, welfare, the arts, parks and wildernesses. Not everything listed here is now privately owned, but there are privatised examples in every category. The very mechanism for buying and selling these things in the UK, the London Stock Exchange, was itself privatised in 1986 as part of the deregulation of the markets, known in financial circles as the ‘big bang’. (The use of nature- or science-based metaphors for the financial sector and markets is a hallmark of neoliberalism, helping to make these systems and the ideological values that underwrite them seem timeless, rational or natural.)

The logic driving privatisation is that goods and services are expensive to run and become needlessly expensive or inefficient when they are run by the state. This is partly because efficiency and value for money are not top of a state’s priorities. There is also an in-built conflict of interest: the state (or those who act on the public’s behalf) is both the employer and the consumer of services so a fundamental conflict is said to arise in priorities. Does the state, for example, choose to pay its workers well, offer them long contracts and a generous retirement pension, which are choices predominantly in the interests of the workers, or does it try to keep costs low and cut back on employee pay and benefits so that the public pays less for its goods and services? The job of the state could be said to do both – to protect its workforce from exploitation in the interest of social stability and to protect the population against unnecessary and bad services and from unaffordable prices for public goods. This may be said to be a good or defensible reason for privatisation, because privatising public goods separates the state as consumer from the state as producer. However, there are mechanisms other than privatisation, and for which argument has been made, that could solve the problem of conflict of interest.

Instead, arguments for privatisation hinge on ideas such as those inherent in the maxim that ‘competition drives innovation’. Not only are private companies said to be more efficient, which drives down costs for consumers, they are more likely to innovate new products and better services as they try to find new niches in the market or increase their market share. The state, on the other hand, because it has a captive market, does not need to provide its goods and services any differently at any point, and so it will settle on the lowest, meanest, least imaginative provision, as the Soviet Union under Stalin seemed to prove. So the argument goes, but these reasons for privatisation can be seen as ideological when looking at the evidence across the spectrum, both globally and historically. Sometimes state provision is mean, inefficient and unimaginative, and sometimes private companies provide mean, inefficient and unimaginative goods and services. Some of these goods, such as telephones and communications services, were indeed improved with privatisation in the early 1980s, although it is also true that when the imperative for universal provision was lifted, the new benefits within the telecoms industry were concentrated in London, not spread across the UK as a whole, as the patchy broadband service demonstrates. The tendency when viewing the situation from this perspective will be to downplay innovation that takes place in the public sector. Support or condemnation tends to be split on right–left political lines, and although privatisation is associated with Conservative or right-wing governments, it is a process that was accelerated by the leftist governments in the 1990s and 2000s in the UK and US, those of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton respectively. The reasons for its implementation are based on assumptions about state and market models that are neoliberal and ideological, given that the evidence substantiating these assumptions is mixed.

In the case of arts funding, it was New Labour that introduced the compulsion for arts organisations to seek private money – be it sponsorship, ‘self-generated income’ or donation – in order to receive public money. This type of funding model, known euphemistically as a ‘mixed economy’ model, became ‘best practice’ across the arts, culture, museums and heritage sector, and the ideal promulgated by the artworld for the rest of the sector, which remained ambivalent.⁶ It is notable that prior to the wholesale acceptance of the New Labour funding model, the artworld shared a general scepticism around funding of the arts. ‘He who pays the piper plays the tune’ was the arts’ maxim and only an arm’s length disinterest was acceptable in Britain prior to the New Labour model. When the Arts Council of Great Britain was formed in 1946, there had been a distance between the arts and government funding arrangements and this distance had been respected by governments of all hues until 1997 when the rationale for arts funding was dramatically altered. For the first time, funding became linked not to an artworld elite’s self-defined not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: Setting the Scene
• CHAPTER 1 Neoliberalism and the Artworld
• CHAPTER 2 We Who Police the Definition and Value of Art
• Part II: Artworld Orthodoxies
• CHAPTER 3 Understanding Power
• CHAPTER 4 The Art–Life Dichotomy
• Part III: A Celebration of Art Practice
• CHAPTER 5 The Disciplinarity of Art Practice
• CHAPTER 6 In Conclusion
• Notes